Through the generous benefaction of Professor Denis Sinor, sometime Honorary Secretary of the Society, a new Society medal has been inaugurated to honour major scholarship on an Inner Asian subject. The field of eligibility has been spiritedly defined as “from Tehran to Tun Huang”, and the award is to be made every three years, for the first time in 1993.

Ancient Arabic poetry in general is rightly regarded in Arab circles as one of the paramount monuments of Arabic literature, and it is of course also held in esteem among Western scholars. For the most part, however, this admiration does not, in effect, extend to the specifically historical poetry quoted – sometimes in vast quantities – in the works of such historians as Ibn A‘tham al-Kūfī, al-Balādhurī, and al-Ṭabarī. It is readily apparent that this verse is often of extraordinary difficulty, that some represents retrojections from later times, and that many poems (in particular the later forgeries) are of an inferior quality; but the often-heard views holding that the historical poetry is, as a whole, of no particular historical importance or literary merit are simply false.

Among the Arabic fragments within the Taylor–Schechter Genizah Collection in the Cambridge University Library, I came upon a piece from Ibn Buṭlān's The Physicians' Dinner Party (Da‘wat al-’aṭibbā’): one of the earliest examples of the Arabic maqāmah. Although the Jews of Arab lands were acquainted with Arabic literature mainly in the form of scientific and philosophical texts, the discovery of our fragment from the Cairo Genizah provides further evidence that they also had some familiarity with Arabic belleslettres.

The coin described below is in the collection of the American Numismatic Society, New York, and, so far as is known, is a unique specimen. The photograph and technical details are by kind permission of the Society, and the authors are grateful to Dr Michael Bates, Curator of Islamic Coins, for his helpfulness here.

The alloying and distribution pattern of early Indian copper and copper-based artefacts and the occurrence of ingots in some archaeological contexts have been variously discussed in Indian archaeological literature. First, the presence of pure copper artefacts in early Indian archaeological contexts is considered to be symptomatic of the scarcity of alloying agents. For instance, D. P. Agrawal has argued that the presence of 70% of pure copper objects among the analysed Harappan artefacts in this metal is reflective of a problem in the procurement of tin; since this metallic ore was not easily available, evidence of copper alloying is scarce. Secondly, the variations in element composition of alloyed artefacts have generally been regarded as evidence of incomplete knowledge of mixing – E. J. H. Mackay's argument that “mixing of the two metals was performed in a most perfunctory manner ” to explain the variations in the average proportions of tin to copper in Mohenjodaro specimens is evocative of this general approach. Thirdly, not many sites which have yielded copper objects have yielded any positive evidence of manufacture – in some cases this may be due to the limited nature of the excavated data, but on the whole one would argue that the sites which can be described as centres of copper metallurgy are comparatively few and far between in the Indian context. Fourthly, the occurrence of copper ingots at different sites has been generally taken to be indicative of trade in this metal.

The maps illustrating the archaeological surveys of Sir Aurel Stein's Central Asian expeditions remain to this day the most authoritative map series concerning the location of archaeological monuments in the Tarim Basin and Gansu Corridor of western China. The aim of this article is to evaluate the present-day value of Stein's maps for both relocating known ancient sites and attempting to locate additional sites on more recent maps. Figure i of this article shows the general area surveyed by Stein's expeditions. This study will be divided into three main parts: (i) a general description of Stein's cartographic surveys in terms of the regions of Xinjiang and Gansu surveyed and features depicted; (2) map series covering this region produced since Stein's surveys, and an outline of the history of the treatment of place names on both Stein's and subsequent maps; (3) an in-depth study of the Niya site area to illustrate both the extent to which Stein's original findings can be relocated on recent maps and the value of such maps for locating additional ancient sites.

Just supposing that the British Council were able to offer lecture tours by the world's great minds of the past, I am sure that names like Aquinas, Chu Hsi or Dōgen would be able to pack an auditorium even now. But in the pub afterwards we would probably find them less easy company, not quite at home in our own times. Reading Tominaga Nakamoto (1715–46), however, one gets the extraordinary but quite palpable feeling of encountering an intelligence every bit as alert and critical as any product of a modern university education – no doubt precisely because by the standards of his own day he was largely selfeducated. To find the entire surviving slim corpus of the writings of this remarkable genius rendered into English by the head of one of our most respected departments of Religious Studies is gratifying indeed, and one hesitates to qualify praise of such a welcome achievement with a note of criticism, especially when the translation is prefaced by a lengthy introduction giving within a limited compass a more than adequate account of Tominaga's all too brief life.